Many food products are produced using cutting or molding techniques incorporating guillotine style cutters or rotary formers. In guillotine systems, the blades are generally straight, and so such systems may typically be limited to food products desirably having linear or angular shapes, such as rectangles or squares. Rotary formers are not so limited. In these systems, a number of cavities that can be of any shape are arranged in a complementary fashion on paired rotary forming wheels. Rotation of the rotary forming wheels causes the cavities to become positioned adjacent to each other forming an enclosed mold as described above. In both types of systems, the food product is desirably fed into the cutter and cut into the desired shape by the guillotine blade or rotary formers.
Both guillotine cutting and rotary forming can be suboptimal methods for forming food products that are sticky or semi-adhesive as delivered to the cutter or former. Typically, the sticky or semi-adhesive properties of the food product cause the food product to stick to the inside of the cavities, which causes the molded food product to resist falling out of the cavity by the force of gravity alone when the wheels separate. Consistency in the formed food product can also be difficult to achieve when the food product is sticky, especially when intricate or complicated shapes are desired.
Some attempts to alleviate or eliminate sticking of food products have involved the use of interconnective webbing formed between the food products during the cutting or molding process by excess food product. This interconnective webbing can act to pull food products from the guillotine cutter or cavities as the web of connected food products is conveyed therefrom. The application of ultrasonic energy has also been described for this purpose.
In the case of the former, the webbing represents excess material that is typically discarded as waste, adding to the cost of the process. And, ultrasonic energy, though fairly effective, can yet be a suboptimal solution in particular when applied to a cutter or former desirably used to form sticky food products, or multilayered products having at least one sticky layer.
More effective solutions for releasing food products from cutters or forming apparatus would thus be welcome in the art.